Lepton fluxes from atmospheric charm

1998/06/30 by L. Pasquali, Mary Hall Reno, M. H. Reno +2 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.59.034020

published as Phys.Rev.D59:034020,1999 · 19 pages, latex, revtex, psfig

arxiv created 1998/07/17 · openalex publication_date 1999/01/11 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We reexamine the charm contribution to atmospheric lepton fluxes in the context of perturbative QCD. We include next-to-leading order corrections and discuss theoretical uncertainties due to the extrapolations of the gluon distributions at small x. We show that the charm contribution to the atmospheric muon flux becomes dominant over the conventional contribution from \ensuremathπ and K decays at energies of about 10⁵ GeV. We compare our fluxes with previous calculations.

Citations

• Charm Production and High Energy Atmospheric Muon and Neutrino Fluxes
• Lepton spectra in the earth's atmosphere
• Observation of a small atmospheric vμ/ve ratio in Kamiokande
• Atmospheric ratio in the multi-GeV energy range
• Experimental study of the atmospheric neutrino flux
• Charm production in hadronic and heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies toO(αs3)

Cited by

• Prompt muon contribution to the flux underwater
• Particle Physics in the Sky and Astrophysics Underground: Connecting the Universe's Largest and Smallest Scales
• Measuring the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux with down-going muons in neutrino telescopes
• A semi-analytic calculation on the atmospheric tau neutrino flux in the GeV to TeV energy range
• High energy neutrinos from charm in astrophysical sources